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New Relic vs Openobserve

New Relic scores higher on the AgentReady, 51/100 against 50/100. They differ on 5 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

New Relic. Intelligent Observability platform that resolves issues at scale before they impact bottom line

Openobserve. Open source, high-performance, unified observability platform for logs, metrics, and traces, built in Rust, with SQL and PromQL support.

Where New Relic is ahead

New Relic passes self-service signup, agent-compatible signup flow and fast time to first request, and Openobserve does not. That is adopt, whether an agent can get a key and make its first successful call without a human in the loop.

Where Openobserve is ahead

Openobserve passes llms-full.txt / full agent docs, and New Relic does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds operate: agent compatibility verified. New Relic misses it.

What neither does

Both fail mcp discoverable, structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented, no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, mcp integration available, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Openobserve leads 87 to 80. New Relic misses llms-full.txt / full agent docs, mcp discoverable; Openobserve misses mcp discoverable.

Understand. Both sit at 23/100 here. New Relic misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented; Openobserve misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented.

Adopt is whether an agent can get a key and make its first successful call without a human in the loop. New Relic leads 65 to 35. New Relic misses no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, mcp integration available; Openobserve misses self-service signup, no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, fast time to first request, mcp integration available.

Operate. Openobserve leads 53 to 35. New Relic misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified; Openobserve misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable.

Pricing

New Relic does not publish a machine-readable starting price and has a free tier. Openobserve does not publish one and has a free tier.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

New Relic clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: New Relic and Openobserve. Alternatives to each: New Relic, Openobserve.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["newrelic", "openobserve"]}